Shaken bikers: It could be me

“Bikes and cars on the road, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Ned Hinman, a Boston University senior, said last night as he straddled his bicycle at the edge of the Marsh Chapel plaza.

Students were beginning to gather for a candlelight remembrance of Christopher Weigl. He was a journalism grad student, whose 23 years on this earth ended in the few seconds it took an 18-wheeler to cross a bike path while making a right turn onto St. Paul Street.

Hinman, 21, followed the same route down Commonwealth Avenue from Allston yesterday, on the same bike path that led him to a white sheet spread out beneath that trailer truck frozen in the middle of the intersection.

“I don’t know,” Hinman sighed, “I suppose the first thought I had was the same as everybody else who bikes to school every day: It could have been me.

“You try to ride safe, try to avoid taking foolish risks, but even when you’re riding in that (bike) lane, you’re never more than a foot away from traffic that’s flying by you.

“All day long, a group of us had this ongoing discussion about where does the blame for a tragedy like that fall? Should the biker have seen the truck? Or was it the other way around?”

Marta Marello, 24, who’s working on her graduate degree in international relations and environmental policy, was sobered by the news that in less than a month’s time, a second BU student was killed riding a bike in town.

As she prepared to pedal three miles up Commonwealth Avenue toward Brighton Center, she strapped on her helmet and checked the flashing red light attached to the back of her jacket and the LED light on the handle bars.

“It’s cheap and quick and I try always to ride as safely as I can,” Marello said.

When she received the text on her phone yesterday alerting her to the death of a fellow student, she braced for an anxious call from her parents back home in Italy.

“I know they will ask me if I am being safe,” she said.

“I will tell them I am. But riding a bike makes the most sense for me,” Marello said.

With that, Marello made sure the lights on her back and her handlebars were flashing as she rode off into the night.

Just before a modest group of students gathered to hold candles and reflect on the loss of a young man whose dreams were every bit as vital as theirs only a few hours before, Michelle Weiser said through tears, “It’s not the bikers’ fault. We’re part of a community that has as much right to use these roads in a clean and efficient manner as the motorists who cut me off when they dart into a parking space, or turn with no signal.

“I don’t want to believe that more students like Chris have to die before the city respects our right to travel in a safe, clean and healthy way.”